


the art of letting go (and coming back)

by jostxnneil



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, POV Keith (Voltron), Temporary Character Death, anyway, listen it's cathartic!, maybe i have a problem, read this to let me stab you emotionally and then twist the knife, this is the second 'character almost dies but doesn't' fic i've written this month
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-29 04:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18771448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jostxnneil/pseuds/jostxnneil
Summary: Keith is no stranger to being left behind, but then he discovers that leaving doesn't always have to be forever. He does some of the leaving, and some more of the getting left behind, but in the end, they always come back to each other.OR, how Lance and Keith say 'I love you' before they ever say I love you, and the art of letting go.





	the art of letting go (and coming back)

**Author's Note:**

> ha ha this is me projecting. enjoy! as always, pls leave comments and kudos.

“Let me go,” Lance says, voice rough.

Keith’s shoulders scream at him to listen but he grits his teeth and holds on tighter because _he can’t, he can’t, he can’t._

“I can’t,” he says.

Lance smiles at him, a small, sad thing.

“Let me go,” he says, soft. “And I’ll come back to you.”

Keith chokes on a sob and swears he feels his heart crack wide open.

“I’ve got you,” he says, for the third, fourth, last time. It feels like a lie.

“Keith,” Lance whispers. Keith hears him perfectly and wishes he didn’t.

He’s crying. He can feel the tears making tracks through the dust and dirt and blood on his face.

“Don’t let go,” Keith tells him. Lance just looks at him, and Keith sees the resignation there—those blue eyes, looking death in the face and accepting it. “Lance, don’t you dare—”

“I’m sorry,” Lance says, and his grip loosens and Keith can’t hold on to him.

“ _Lance,”_ he cries, panicked, but Lance just smiles that small sad smile and his hand slips away and Keith has to watch him fall—

_“Lance!”_

…………..

They don’t have time, not really, but they act both like they do and like they don’t when they fall in love with each other.

Most people their age are still on top of the world, convinced of their own invincibility, but Keith and Lance have both nearly died enough times for the reality of war to set in.

More than set in, really—they look death in the face on a near daily basis, and the gritty reality of it settles into their bones, heavy, and stays there.

They don’t usually let it get to them, too busy fighting against a tyrannical intergalactic empire to think about it, but new love is a soft, fragile thing in the midst of the blood and pain and death, and so they dance around each other for a long time before they ever get to anything else.

It starts with nothing more than lingering looks. Private smiles meant only for each other. And all Keith knows about it, is that it feels—warm.

He’s never been in love before. He’s not sure what it’s supposed to feel like, but he never imagined it’d be anything like the way he feels when Lance turns to him on the battlefield with a triumphant grin, covered in grime and looking at him like they were sharing a secret in the quiet of the night during a sleepover instead of standing in a crowded plaza on a foreign planet.

Whatever he expected love to be, if he ever expected it at all, was nothing like what he has with Lance.

They don’t kiss, not really. Sometimes he presses his lips against the top of Lance’s head when they’re drowsing in the lounge late at night. Lance kisses the corner of his mouth when he comes out of the healing pod after a particularly bad close call, barely a featherlight brush against his skin that none of the others even notice.

The things other people in love typically do aren’t there, but as far as Keith can tell, neither of them are unhappy with that.

It’s just them. It’s just how they work. Maybe someday things will change, but for now—this is everything. This is enough.

They sleep in the same bed, sometimes, and they go from always butting heads to gravitating around each other like they’re sizing each other up to living in each other’s pockets as though they’ve always been that way fairly quickly.

Keith settles. The crackle of rage that kept him constant company for most of his life quiets in Lance’s company, and he savors the peace they have.

But they’re fighting a war.

…………….

Keith leaves, first. Shiro comes back and he remembers what Lance said about six paladins and five lions and he stares at the symbol on his mother’s blade in the middle of night with Lance sleeping nestled against his side, and he decides that it might as well be him.

The others gather him up in the warmest hug he ever remembers getting, and even though they’re watching him he watches Lance, looking for—something.

Lance gives him what he’s looking for in the form of a slight nod, even through the tears watering at the corners of his eyes, and Keith offers him one of their private smiles in return.

Later, Lance finds him alone and puts a comm device in his pocket and makes him promise to keep in contact when he can. He adjusts Keith’s armor even though it’s already perfect and smooths his hands over the insignia on Keith’s chest.

“I know this is something that you have to do,” he finally says. “But don’t let yourself forget that you’re wanted here no matter what. Even if you’re not piloting a lion—you’ll always be a paladin.”

And then he steps back, and smiles, like he hasn’t just said everything Keith didn’t know he needed to hear, and adds, “Come back to me, okay? Things won’t be the same without you.”

Keith nods, and swallows, and says, “Don’t do anything stupid without me,” because he wants to see Lance grin one last time.

And he does, wide and blinding, and Keith tucks it away next to his heart to remember when the nights feel long as he adds a wink and says, “I make no promises.”

“Dick,” Keith mutters.

“Asshole,” Lance replies, with a bright cheerfulness that makes Keith’s chest ache. He takes a step back, taps his fingers to his temple in a salute, and walks away.

Keith watches him go until he turns a corner, and then he climbs into the pod and leaves the Castle behind.

He doesn’t look behind him as he goes, because he knows that he’ll come back.

After all, he promised.

………………..

Keith leaves again, next.

The Shiro they found is a clone, and Lance is the one who figures it out and nearly gets himself killed because of it. The others don’t believe him when he tries to tell them that something’s off, so he looks into it on his own and whoever’s pulling the strings decides that he’s getting too close to the truth.

Keith comes back with his mother in tow and then leaves again to chase the clone and finish what Lance started—finding the truth. He barely has time to meet eyes with Lance across the hangar before he’s turning back around, and he almost expects a protest but it doesn’t come from Lance.

“Let him go,” Lance says, voice clearer and more commanding than Keith has ever heard it, and he wonders at all that’s happened in his absence. “He’ll come back.”

Allura meets Lance’s eyes with her own steely gaze, and he doesn’t back down, and after a few seconds that seem to last forever, she nods.

So Keith leaves.

It’s not as long, this time. He fights his brother’s clone and gets burned and at what he thinks is the end of it all he can’t let go to save himself, and that should’ve been his warning.

Black saves them both, and they come back.

…………….

After that—after that, Haggar is still out there, and Shiro is still resting, and they get a few weeks to adjust before they’re once again faced with the problem of too many paladins and not enough lions.

Or—well, not exactly. Keith knows that Shiro would be content to step down and lead from the Castle, but he also knows that he’s caught Lance looking out of the Castle windows more than he ever did before and that he fights in the training room like he’s got something to prove.

Keith knows a little bit about that, so he isn’t surprised when Lance steps up to Allura during a meeting with his jaw set in determination and his eyes burning with blue fire and asks to leave.

She doesn’t seem surprised, and Keith wonders if she’s noticed the same things that he has, maybe even more, for even longer. Hunk and Pidge try to protest, but Allura raises a hand and they both fall silent—and she tells Lance that he’s free to go.

Some tension that Keith hadn’t really noticed Lance had gained drops from his shoulders, and he nods thanks to Allura before taking a deep breath and summoning a bright smile to offer the others.

They send him off similarly to the way they’d done with Keith, gathering him up in a hug. Hunk cries, which makes Lance tear up, and Pidge starts sniffling suspiciously towards the end before she punches him in the arm and makes her exit.

Keith finds Lance later. Before he has the chance to say anything, Lance holds up a comm unit, identical to the one he’d given Keith, and smiles.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m not going radio silence on you.”

Keith smiles at him, soft and fond, and catches the hand holding the comm unit that he still has raised. Lance seems to know what he wants before he does, as always, and after a moment of adjustments their hands are clasped between them with the comm unit pressed between their palms.

“I get why,” Keith says. “But I wish you didn’t have to go.”

Lance half-smiles, mostly fond but a little sad, and catches the fingers of his free hand in the collar of Keith’s shirt.

“Let me go,” he says, “and I’ll come back to you.”

Keith presses a soft, lingering kiss to the corner of Lance’s mouth and presses their foreheads together, tangling his fingers in Lance’s hair to keep him close.

“I know,” he says. “That’s why I can let you go.”

They hold each other for a long time alone in a darkened hallway, clasped hands warm between their chests, and at the end of it they let go slowly and step away from each other.

“Don’t take too long,” Keith tells him. “It gets boring without you.”

Lance raises an eyebrow, almost laughing. “Fighting an intergalactic space war gets boring?”

Keith nods. “Only without you, though.”

“Guess I definitely have to come back now, huh? Wouldn’t want you getting bored.” Lance snaps off that same quick, two-fingered salute from before and turns without another word.

Keith lets him go.

That’s their deal, after all, unspoken or not—let go, and come back. It’s just about all they can manage in the middle of a war.

And goodbyes—well. Goodbyes feel too permanent, so they never say them.

They know, anyway. They’ve never had to say it to know it.

……………

Lance comes back in a blaze of glory, appearing out of nowhere with a fleet of rebel ships in his wake in the middle of a battle that they’d been close to losing, even with Voltron.

Keith just _knows,_ the second the ships are picked up on radar, and is already grinning when their comms crackle to life with a voice that sets his skin electric with how much he’d missed it.

“You look like you could use some help,” Lance says, and for the first time in their long history, Keith wants to kiss him so badly that the breath is knocked out of him with the force of it.

And he laughs, because Lance is _here_ and he’ll still be here later, when the battle is over, and even though they have no way of knowing how much time they have they still have _time._

“You’re late to the party, sharpshooter,” he teases, and Lance’s face pops up in a video feed on his dash so that Keith can see every detail of his grin.

“If you’re gonna be ungrateful, I can just leave—”

“Don’t you dare,” Hunk, Allura, and Pidge all say at the same time.

Lance laughs, and Keith knows that he’s not doing a very good job of keeping what’s between them secret from the others, knows that his feelings have to be plastered all over his face—

But then again, it’s always been an open secret anyway, hasn’t it?

“C’mon,” Lance says. “Let’s get these sons of bitches.”

Later, when the battle is won, Keith spots Lance across the hangar and starts sprinting before the recognition has even fully hit—in person, he can categorize all the differences that the video feed hadn’t captured, like the scar bisecting Lance’s right eyebrow that ends just below his right eye and the fact that he’s taller than Keith again and his shoulders are even broader, somehow—

Keith slams into him and Lance catches him and stumbles back with a laugh—Keith wishes he could bottle the sound of Lance’s laugh—and then Keith is kissing him and Lance is smiling into the kiss and winding his arms around Keith’s waist to pull him closer and they fit together even more perfectly than they had before.

Behind them, a throat clears.

“Uh,” Hunk coughs. “Listen, I know you two are happy to see each other, but, like. I’d like to give my best bro a hug, and also do you have to make out, like, right there. Right in front of everyone.”

Keith doesn’t bother to break away from Lance to respond verbally, instead twisting his arm behind his back and flipping them all off.

Shiro tries to disguise a laugh as a cough and fails utterly.

Eventually, Hunk gets them to pull away from each other by gathering them both up into a bear hug, and the others join in to wrap around Lance, and Keith is incandescently happy.

…………….

Keith, in the rush of everything, in the strangeness of being happy, forgets the first lesson he learned when his dad died.

Nothing lasts forever.

……………….

They’re separated from the others, trying to fight back to safety in a pink desert that almost looks like home, when it happens.

Keith and Lance fight well together. They’re a good team; that’s what Lance had said, back at the very beginning of it all, and he’d been so, so right.

But they’re tired and the terrain is unfamiliar and the odds are stacked against them.

Still—Lance just shoots him a cocky grin when their enemies finally catch up to them near a ravine and grabs his hand to press a kiss to his knuckles before letting it go to fall into a defensive stance.

“We’ve so got this,” he says, and Keith grins back, fierce and more than a little wild—when they leap into action, they do it perfectly in sync.

And everything is going just fine, but then one of them gets past Keith’s guard and clips him on the temple—not enough to do much more than disorient him and knock him back a step, but his reaction time gets slower after that, and the two of them are slowly but surely backed against the edge of the ravine.

Despite that, they’re still winning. Their enemies aren’t Galra; if Keith had to judge based on appearance he’d say they’re mercenaries for hire, and against two paladins of Voltron none of them manage to measure up.

But it’s enough to wear them down. Enough, with Keith’s delayed reaction time and slight daze after the blow to the head, for him to miss the warning signs when the last of their opponents decides on a particularly desperate course of action.

Lance doesn’t miss it, though. So when the alien drops his weapon and leaps forward to tackle them both off of the edge of the cliff, selfless bastard that he is, he reaches over and shoves Keith out of the way and takes the brunt of the hit himself.

It’s not quite enough to send them both immediately over, but Lance doesn’t have enough room to use his bayard and they grapple for a second, rock crumbling and falling under Lance’s heels.

Keith grabs the back of the alien’s collar to haul them both back, heart crawling into his throat from fear, and for a second he thinks that it’s going to be fine, but then the alien lets go and _shoves,_ and Keith hurls him backwards with strength he didn’t know he had—he hears a cry of alarm cut short with a thud and a crack and doesn’t bother to look—and lunges after Lance.

His fingers lock around Lance’s wrist, and Lance grabs bruisingly back as his momentum slams him into the side of the cliff and then starts to pull Keith after him—for a second Keith thinks they’re both going to go down, and then his hand finds purchase in the rock and even as he cries out when the edges bite into his hand and his shoulder barks in pain, they stop sliding.

His feet scrabble for footholds, but despite the rough terrain of the desert, the sides of the ravine itself are oddly smooth.

He tries, then, to pull them both up, but his arm gives out on him before he’s raised Lance more than a few inches and the sudden drop nearly makes him lose his grip.

Lance’s fingers squeeze even tighter around his wrist for half a second, and Keith very carefully does not look down at him, instead looking up and hoping that he’ll see the others coming to their rescue.

But no one’s there, and the wind whistles around the twists and turns of the ravine to hammer in just how alone they are.

So Keith looks down.

At the bottom of the ravine, a deep blue river glitters, and that’s almost like home too—just a touch too dark.

Keith looks at Lance, then, and his expression is so achingly soft that Keith immediately feels hot tears start to gather at the back of his throat, but his eyes…those are exactly like home.

“I’ve got you,” Keith says. “I’ve got you.”

“You can’t hold us both,” Lance says, strangely calm.

“I can.”

“You can’t,” Lance says. “You have to let me go, or I’ll just pull you down with me.”

“No.”

“Keith.”

“ _No.”_

He tries to pull them up again, but something in his shoulder strains and shifts and pulls a strangled cry from his throat. He gasps in air for a long moment, resting his forehead against the rock.

When he looks down again, part of him knows. His whole body screams and clamors against it, somehow holding on even tighter, but he can see it in Lance’s face, and they lock eyes and just drink each other in.  

“Let me go,” Lance says, voice rough.

Keith’s shoulders scream at him to listen but he grits his teeth and holds on tighter because _he can’t, he can’t, he can’t._

“I can’t,” he says.

Lance smiles at him, a small, sad thing.

“Let me go,” he says, soft. “And I’ll come back to you.”

Keith chokes on a sob and swears he feels his heart crack wide open.

“I’ve got you,” he says, for the third, fourth, last time. It feels like a lie.

“Keith,” Lance whispers. Keith hears him perfectly and wishes he didn’t.

He’s crying. He can feel the tears making tracks through the dust and dirt and blood on his face.

“Don’t let go,” Keith tells him. Lance just looks at him, and Keith sees the resignation there—those blue eyes, looking death in the face and accepting it. “Lance, don’t you dare—”

“I’m sorry,” Lance says, and his grip loosens and Keith can’t hold on to him.

“ _Lance,”_ he cries, panicked, but Lance just smiles that small sad smile and his hand slips away and Keith has to watch him fall—

_“Lance!”_

……………

Keith isn’t sure how long he hangs there, sobbing and screaming against the cliff, but eventually he pulls himself back up over the edge and collapses in the dirt, still shaking with the force of his grief, face sticky with tears.

His chest feels like it’s been cleaved open, and he _screams._

What feels like hours later but is probably only twenty minutes— _twenty minutes—_ the others spot him.

He hears them calling his name in the distance and can’t bring himself to respond, having finally lapsed into silence after screaming his throat raw, and he just sits there, staring out over the ravine.

“Keith, hey,” Shiro says, reaching him first and shaking his arm, turning him, trying to get his attention and figure out where he’s injured. “Hey, are you hurt? What happened?”

He’d been scanning over Keith’s armor, looking for blood or any other signs of injury, but his eyes finally find Keith’s face and Keith has no idea what expression he’s wearing right now but as soon as Shiro sees it he _knows_ and goes completely, earth-shatteringly still.

“Shiro, what’s wrong with him? Is he hurt? Where’s Lance?” Allura asks, catching up to him. Hunk and Pidge are on her heels, and they echo her questions, tacking on their own— _did the two of them get separated, why isn’t Keith saying anything, does Keith know who hired the mercenaries._

Shiro must give them a look or raise a hand to stop them or something, because they stop several yards away and fall silent.

He kneels carefully next to Keith, still holding onto his shoulder. Keith is still staring past him, can’t bring himself to look him in the eye.

“Keith,” he says softly. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Keith jerks his head to the side—no. No. If he says it out loud that makes it _real,_ if he says it out loud that means that Lance is—

“Hey, bud, look at me. Can you look at me?” Shiro asks, and Keith drags his eyes to Shiro’s face. “There you go. I’m here. I need you to tell me what happened.”

And Keith thought he was all out of tears but the soft, knowing, understanding look in Shiro’s eyes has the sobs shaking his shoulders again.

“I can’t—” he chokes out, and Shiro pulls him forward into a hug and he buries his face against Shiro’s head like he hasn’t done since he was a kid.

“I’ve got you,” he says, and a hysterical laugh bubbles out of Keith at the words.

“Lance—” he tries, and chokes on the words. After a few heaving breaths, he tries again, because he knows if he can just get a few words out Shiro will piece together the rest of it on his own. “The—Shiro, he—the ravine—”

And then he loses his voice again, but Shiro’s arms tighten around him and he knows that he’d understood.

“What’d he say?” he hears Hunk ask, faintly, behind him, and he cries so hard he thinks he’ll shake apart with the force of it. “Shiro, _what’d he say?”_

A sudden rush of adrenaline makes Keith’s chest seize, and he tries to pull away, pushing frantically against his chest and looking over his shoulder at the ravine. “I have to—Shiro, we have to—to find him—I can’t _leave_ him here—”

“What is he talking about?” Hunk hisses, and Keith hears footsteps coming closer as Shiro tries to pull him back, grabbing at his arms to try and keep him still.

“Keith—Keith, no, we can’t—” he tries, but Keith shakes his head, pulling out of his grip and stumbling to his feet.

“No, no, no—I’m not leaving without him, Shiro!” he shouts, raking his fingers through his hair, not caring at the sharp pain when his hands get caught in the knots and tangles.

There’s a sharp intake of breath, and then a small, “Oh.”

Pidge.

Keith feels her hand on the small of his back, and hears as she starts to choke on tears of her own. Always too smart for her own good—of course she figured it out.

“Keith—” she starts.

“We have to find him,” he says again, and she wraps her fingers around his belt.

“Okay,” she says softly.

Keith sees Shiro’s expression soften at them both, and notes the signs of him holding back tears of his own—the shine in his eyes, the clenched teeth, the way a muscle is jumping in his cheek.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “We’ll take Black down to—to look.”

There’s a loud choking sound behind them, and they all turn—it’s Hunk, shoving a fist against his mouth like that’ll keep the tears at bay. He sees them looking, sees the expression on Keith’s face, and starts immediately shaking his head even as the tears start falling in earnest.

“No,” he says. “No, no, no, no—he’s _not_ dead! Lance isn’t dead!”

Keith flinches at every word as though they’re physical blows.

Allura reaches out, putting a comforting hand on Hunk’s shoulder. Her voice is choked when she speaks, and far more tired than someone her age should sound. “Hunk—”

He shakes her off roughly, stepping out of her reach, still shaking his head. “No.” He inhales sharply, nearly gasping, until his tears are under control. “He’s too stubborn to die. He wouldn’t leave us like that.”

“Hunk,” Shiro says. His voice is so soft and careful Keith wants to punch him for it. “That fall…”

Hunk sets his jaw stubbornly. “No. I’m not giving up on him.”

Pidge’s breath shudders next to Keith, and he feels her grip tighten on his belt, like she’s trying to keep him from running away.

Or jumping after Lance.

“We’ll find him,” Shiro promises.

Black, as if on cue, lands in the rocky dust next to them, opening her jaw to invite them all in. Keith stops at the end of the ramp for a long moment, trying to work up the courage to go in.

He’s not sure this is what he wants anymore. Because when they find him—it’s over. That’s it.

The tears start to fall again, and he doesn’t bother to try and stop them, but he pushes himself forward anyway, one step at a time up the ramp with Pidge treading quietly on his heels, her fingers still hooked into his belt.

No one speaks. The silence weighs heavy, with silent tears falling down everyone’s cheeks—even Shiro’s, as Keith finds out when he catches a glimpse of his brother’s reflection.

Red is crying at the end of their bond. Keith can feel her distress, her pain—but he locks her out of his head, because he can’t face it.

Not yet.

…………….

The water, it turns out, isn’t exactly water.

“It’s still drinkable, technically, but it’s not the same,” Pidge says, scrubbing tears from her eyes with her gloved hands to read the scanner results properly. “The—I don’t know, the consistency is different. I don’t think it’d react the same way to someone falling into it as water on Earth would.”

Allura gently pulls the tablet with the results from Pidge’s hands, tucking it into the pouch on her belt. “Even if it didn’t, Pidge, a fall from that height…even an Altean wouldn’t…”

She trails off, apparently unable to finish her sentence, and shakes her head, wiping at her own face. “This way, come on, then. The current is fairly slow. He wouldn’t have been carried far.”

Keith’s chest feels tighter and tighter with every step. Pidge seems to notice, and instead of hooking her fingers back into his belt, she catches his wrist, and then tucks her hand into his.

His grief almost overwhelms him all over again. But he sets his jaw against the wave. He’s on a mission—he won’t let himself fall apart now.

…………….

Pidge is the one who spots him.

“Guys, over there. Is that…?” she says, squinting.

A splash of blue, tucked away behind a bit of snarled brush on the bank. Out of place against the red-pink sand. Too light to be light against the strange water of the dark river.

Keith is running before the others even have the chance to register what they’re seeing.

He turns around the brush—and there he is.

Arranged strangely, like he or someone else had pulled him from the river and deposited him there, one hand resting on his stomach.

His lips are nearly blue.

Keith drops to his knees next to him, crying so hard he can barely see—no earth-shattering sobs anymore, just quiet, endless tears.

He reaches out with a shaky hand and smooths Lance’s wet hair carefully back from his face.

His skin is—cold, and wet, from the river, but still soft. Still Lance.

Keith crumples. He cradles the back of Lance’s head with the palm of his hand, as gentle as he knows how to be, pressing their brows together and cupping Lance’s cheek with his other hand.

He feels the others arrive next to him and doesn’t bother to look up. He hears Hunk stumble and then fall to his knees, heaving, and Allura rubbing his back and murmuring softly to him.

Shiro kneels next to Keith, resting a hand on his shoulder and reaching around to press his palm to Lance’s wet hair.

Pidge picks her way slowly over and to Lance’s other side, crouching on the bank and reaching for his hand.

Keith wishes, viciously, fiercely, that they’d both fallen. That Lance hadn’t noticed the alien, and that they’d gone over the edge together.

Because this—he doesn’t know how to keep going after this. He doesn’t think that he can.

“Guys,” Pidge says, and swipes at her face, sniffling. Something in her expression changes as he looks up to see her through his tears. “Guys, wait, hold on. I think I can—”

Her fingers are on Lance’s wrist, not his hand—at his pulse point. Keith suddenly feels like he might throw up, because—as much as he wants the hope, looking at Lance’s still face, at his colorless lips, it doesn’t seem possible.

“Pidge, don’t,” Keith says, sharply. “Just— _don’t.”_

Don’t give me false hope.

She shakes her head, wiping more tears. At this point she’s only really managing to smear them around her face. “No, I—Shiro, _please._ ”

Keith isn’t sure what Shiro’s thinking, and he doesn’t want to look, but his brother moves carefully around him, clasping Pidge’s hand gently in his to pull it away from Lance’s wrist. She looks at him pleadingly through her tears, and he opens his mouth as though to say something and then shakes his head, just once, and carefully places his own fingers where Pidge’s had been.

His eyes—change, after a moment, and his brow furrows. He presses harder, looking sharply up at Lance’s face.

“There’s a pulse,” he whispers, in shock. “It’s weak, barely there, but—”

Pidge laughs—a sharp, wet, hysterical sound, through her tears. “He’s not dead.”

………………..

Keith stares at the glass.

He doesn’t know the last time he slept, but he knows it’s been—a while.

The Castle is dark. Everyone else is probably in bed, like they should be, but he can’t leave. If he leaves, he’ll forget.

There’s color in Lance’s lips again. Not much, given the icy cold of the healing pods, but they’re not the blue they’d been on the river bank.

Coran isn’t sure he’ll wake up. He and Allura have both been trying to keep their spirits up, trying to prove that they believe that Lance will be just fine, but Keith can see right through them.

He’s pretty sure they’re not fooling anyone. Hunk is clinging to it like he’s got nothing else left, though, and—Keith understands that.

So he doesn’t call anyone on their bullshit.

To be fair, though, even if he wanted to, he’s not sure he’d be able to find his voice to do it. Every time the others are around, it’s like his throat closes up and his voice abandons him. There’s just no energy left in him to talk to them.

None of them try to force him to talk. They just let him be, mostly. He’s grateful for that.

“God, I—I want to _hate_ you,” he whispers. His voice—what’s left of it—is a ruin. “Why’d you do that?”

Lance, of course, doesn’t answer.

“You let go, you— _fucking_ —asshole. _You let go.”_

He presses his lips together, pulls them in, inhales shakily. He didn’t think he had any tears left in him, but he can feel them prickling at the corners of his eyes.

His head falls forward until it hits the glass of Lance’s pod. His voice is suddenly gone again, but now that he’s started crying again he can’t seem to stop.

………………..

Keith is leaning against a column, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the distant galaxy he can see through the Castle window because staring at Lance’s face just makes it even harder to breathe, when something on the console next to the pod beeps softly.

The blue light indicating Lance’s status—stable—flares a soft white and then dims completely, and Keith is scrambling up in an instant, fear catapulting his heart into his throat.

Just as he reaches the pod, the glass vanishes, and Lance falls forward.

Keith barely manages to catch him, his arms shaky from the poor way he’s been taking care of himself, but he keeps them from both tumbling to the floor and carefully sinks down, holding Lance against his shoulder as his skin starts to warm and he starts to wake up.

The reassuring feeling of his breath against Keith’s neck is enough to lift some of the weight from his chest.  

After a few long, utterly terrifying moments, Lance stops being deadweight in his grip, and his arms reach up to wrap back around Keith in return.

“Keith,” he breathes, and Keith’s eyes well with tears.

“You fucking asshole,” he chokes out, voice hoarse and rough with disuse. Lance laughs quietly, holding him tighter. “Don’t _fucking_ laugh, you _dick—”_

“I’m sorry,” Lance murmurs, and Keith bites his tongue. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t let you fall too.”

“I would rather die than lose you,” Keith says, fiercely. “ _I would rather die.”_

“Keith—”

“No, Lance. When I saw you fall—when I thought I’d lost you—you have _no idea_ how I felt. Maybe you think I would’ve gotten over it eventually, but Lance, losing you isn’t the sort of thing I could ever move on from. I could let you go if I knew you were coming back—that’s the _deal_ , Lance, that’s what we do, we let each other go _because we know we’ll always come back to each other._ But you weren’t going to come back. _And you made me let you go.”_

Lance pulls back, breathing out a shaky breath, and there are tears in his eyes same as Keith’s. “I couldn’t lose you either, don’t you get it? If I can save you—even if it means that I don’t make it—I’m _always going to save you._ I can’t bear the thought of—I couldn’t, okay? If you’d died because you were trying to save me, because you were too stubborn to let go, I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself.”

Keith cries harder and shakes his head but doesn’t say anything because he knows that Lance is right—if Lance had been the one holding him up, he would’ve done the same. He would’ve fallen to save Lance.

“Does it really matter, though?” Lance asks, feather soft, and Keith wants to glare at him because _of course it does_ —but when he looks, Lance is smiling, sweet and perfect, and all he can do is drink him in. “You let me go—and I came back to you.”

Keith kisses him. It’s messy because they’re both crying and he’s doing his best to keep his sobs locked away in his chest because he’s really had enough of them—but Lance kisses him back, slow and warm, and Keith presses a hand to Lance’s chest and feels his heart beating strong against his palm—

“I love you,” he says, through his tears and heaving breaths, and Lance kisses him again. “I love you, I love you, I love you—”

“I love you too,” Lance whispers. “So much—you have no idea—”

Keith cradles Lance’s face between his hands and smooths his hair back from his face, and Lance reaches out and brushes his thumb across Keith’s bottom lip.

“I’m still mad at you,” Keith mumbles, and Lance laughs and knocks their foreheads together.

“That’s okay,” he says. “I’ve got time to make it up to you.”


End file.
